Another Planet

Another Planet

Apple has come our rather badly in a new Greenpeace report because of its reliance on coal to power its datacentres. According to Greenpeace, cloud computing used 623 billion kilowatt hours in 2007, set to triple by 2020. If cloud computing were a country, it would have been ranked fifth in the world in terms of energy consumption – and Microsoft and Amazon were also said to use coal to power parts of their cloud infrastructure. Amazon said the cloud computing model has environmental benefits, cutting energy use by allowing “hundreds of thousands of companies” to consolidate their datacentres into its cloud, “resulting in much higher utilisation rates and eliminating the waste that occurs when datacentres don’t operate near their capacity”. Apple refuted the report, saying the data was inaccurate and claiming its new iCloud datacentre would be the greenest ever built .Facebook was praised for its new datacentre in Sweden – powered by renewable – while Google’s score was helped by its efforts to improve its energy buying policies. You can see more on Apple and the environment in Luke’s blog here.

The Campaign for a More Sustainable Olympics (CAMSOL) has admitted that it was behind a fake London 2012 Olympic Games press release saying oil and gas giants BP has been dropped as a sustainability partner. Both the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and BP have fervently denied this is true – instead slamming the release as a hoax. Speaking to edie.net a BP spokesperson said the press release as entirely false, saying “it’s a complete hoax – the release doesn’t come from LOCOG or obviously BP”, adding that “we know it’s a hoax and will be continuing to tell people so”. There has been series of disappointing news stories from the Olympics which is a shame (and a missed opportunity) – and the latest is that Despite a commitment to a zero waste Olympic games, shops and suppliers at London 2012 will be able to hand out plastic bags to visitors. According to packaging guidelines issued by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), official London 2012 licensees, shops and suppliers will use plastic bags made form low density polyethylene (LDPE).

However ……. the London Legacy Development Corporation have said that the London 2012 Olympic Games legacy will set a benchmark for sustainable living with the creation of a park complex built to zero carbon and waste standards. After the Games the Corporation will develop the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a 225 hectare site housing up to 8,000 homes, five sporting venues, with 45 hectares of bio-diverse habitat and a network of pathways, cycle routes and waterways. The homes on the park will utilise energy-efficient home appliances which should lead to a 15% reduction in emissions from energy use by residents over a five-year period. All timber products used during the construction process will be sustainably sourced and major materials will feature a 25% minimum recycled content.

This really is ‘ANOTHER PLANET’ ! Running out of resources – mine asteroids? Sound like science fiction but Avatar director James Cameron is one of a number of big name investors behind a new company called Planetary Resources which plans to research the possibility of using robot ships to mine rocks in space – which may have a potential value of up to 12.4 Trillion EACH – and there are some 7,500 already indentified. The consortium includes Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Microsoft Chairman Charles Simonyi. Image: NASA.

The UK has been singled out for its success in “drastically reducing” the amount of municipal waste sent landfill over the past decade – but it still lags behind Europe’s best performers. A European Commission (EC) report found that between 2002 and 2009, the UK cut the amount of waste going to landfill from 464kg per capita to 259kg but despite this, it remains well behind countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Austria and Sweden who all landfilled less than 3% of their municipal waste in 2010, compared to the UK’s 48%.

Shale oil gas – it has highly environmentally destructive mining techniques which run the risk of creating earthquakes and which release methane and which also pollute or water – so surely a big NO? Well – maybe – Charles Clover argues in the Times (Sunday 22nd April) that until renewable energy sources are developed and catch up with demand, we need to think about the use of gas as beneficial – as the quickest way of cutting carbon emissions in most big economies is by “converting from coal to gas which produces half as much carbon dioxide as coal”. It’s all in “This shale rage is threatening to put out the lights”.

Investment in the UK’s clean energy sector made a strong comeback last year – growing by 35% after struggling in 2010 – with offshore wind “poised” to create significant future investments. A new report ‘Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?’ by the Pew charitable trust says that investment in 2011 reached £5.89bn ($9.4bn) – up from £4.36bn ($7bn) in 2010 when it slipped from third place to thirtieth as investment fell.

Engineering professor Julia King, vice-chancellor of Aston University had predicted that over 2 million engineering jobs could be created over the next decade as the UK looks to cut carbon emissions to meet key targets, King, who advises the Government on education and technology issues and is a non-executive director of BIS, said “Engineering is crucial to our quality of life and to combating climate change.” And Edie.net reports that the UK must act now if it wants to take the lead in smart grids and create thousands of high skilled jobs. The research by Ernst and Young for the SmartGrid GB group, a stakeholder group of 23 businesses, claims that the UK could be at the forefront of smart grid technology if it takes an innovate approach and acts quickly and this could help create around 10,000 high skill jobs and contribute £13bn to the economy by creating a £5bn export market.

Shell is developing low-carbon biofuels from inedible plants and crop waste that could potentially be blended at higher concentrations with petrol and diesel. The company’s biofuels research team is working with biotech firms and academic institutions across the world on the flagship project in a bid to commercialise its R&D work in this field. However it admits the research being carried out is highly complex and poses “considerable challenges” and says not every process being developed will become commercially available.

Two-thirds of the top performing councils that operate a dry recycling household collection service in Britain are adopting a co-mingled approach. The findings from a WYG report found that 20 out of 30 leading recycling authorities considered co-mingled collections to be more cost-effective and generated higher recycling rates than separating materials out at the kerbside. The research, which was part funded by Biffa and trade body PlasticsEurope, will further fuel the long-running debate over co-mingled versus source-segregated collection schemes.

Good to hear that Jenny Dawson is using food waste from London’s new Covent Garden (basically perfectly good food that has not been sold by wholesalers) and is making chutneys from the fruit and vegetables for her new business , Rubies in the Rubble. the 7.2 million tonnes of annual foodwaste in the UK has traditionally gone into landfill where it decomposes producing CO2 and methane – and global warming.

Sticking with food … the British Hospitality Association (BHA) has joined forces with Specialist Waste Recycling (SWR) in a bid to improve the management of waste streams at hotels, restaurants and food service providers As part of the new partnership, SWR will provide businesses in the hospitality industry with tailored waste management schemes to help them better manage and reduce their waste.

Want to invest in green energy? There is a new scheme set up by Abundance Generation bridging the gap between members of the public and renewables projects that need funding. The first project is a £1.3 million wind turbine in Gloucestershire that will provide power for 500 homes. The inimum investment is just £5 – and the maximum £50,000!

Naughty boys: The UK’s South West Water (SWW) has been fined £16,000 after polluting the Tamar Estuary with poor quality sewage effluent. The company pled guilty to four water pollution offences at Plymouth Magistrates. SWW also had to pay £4,211 in costs.

One year after piloting the bike industry’s first carbon fibre recycling program, Trek Bicycle has recovered over 31,750kg of material from its manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, US. The bike manufacturer entered into a partnership with Materials Innovation Technologies to divert the fibre from landfill through a closed loop production process.

A four-star Welsh hotel has installed a £0.5m biomass plant on site in a bid to generate its own biomass fuel and cut its energy bills. The new 600Kw renewable energy system at the Tre-Ysgawen Hall Country House Hotel and Spa in Anglesey aims to reduce the hotel’s £200,000 a year energy bills by nearly 50%.

In fact, Energy-from-waste (EfW) has the potential to meet a third of Britain’s domestic gas demand according to new research. However in order to exploit this opportunity, a further 80 EfW facilities need to be built by 2020, on top of the 30 already operating in the UK.

The UK and US are set to forge a new agreement on greener energy initiatives, with a floating wind turbines project kicking off the partnership. The agreement forms part of the Clean Energy Ministerial talks which sees energy ministers from 23 of the world’s leading economies gather in the capital to discuss the transition to clean energy technologies.

I’ve just come across CleanTech Solutions , an interesting blog by Salman Zafar – its full of interesting blogs and reblogs – and you can find out more about Salman and topics as diverse as recycling aluminium, waste to energy (or EfW!) and biomass energy in South East Asia at Salman’s Infobahn at http://www.salmanzafar.org/

And finally, can we pass on AGF’s congratulations to Edie.net reporter Carys Matthews who completed the Brighton Marathon in the super fast time of three hours and thirty minutes – and raised £690 for our friends at WaterAid in the process. Go Go Go Team Green!